Vanity vs. Moral Stem-Cell Sanity

Neocutis Claims It’s Obeying ‘Laws of God and Man’

SAN FRANCISCO — Cells from fetuses
have “unique properties” that aid in healing, boasts a Swiss biopharmaceutical
firm, in response to complaints that it uses fetal cell lines in skin-care
products.

A Christian watchdog group called
Children of God for Life brought attention to the fact that the company,
Neocutis, used the cell lines, derived from an abortion, in the products.

“It’s absolutely deplorable,” said
the Tennessee group’s founder and executive director, Debi Vinnedge. “It’s not
even for humanitarian reasons. They are exploiting the remains of a
deliberately slaughtered baby for nothing other than vanity.”

Vinnedge usually concentrates her
watchdog efforts on therapeutic rather than cosmetic products because
manufacturers must make public the sources of the medical treatments but can
and usually do keep private the ingredients of beauty treatments.

“But if someone asks, as they did in
this case, about a beauty product, I’ll look into it,” she said. What she found
when she checked the published research cited by Neocutis on its website to
back up its claims about Bio-Gel, Journee, Bio-serum Intensive Treatment and
Bio-Restorative Skin Cream was their derivation from the skin tissue of a
14-week-old fetus electively aborted at the University of Lausanne Hospital in
Switzerland. “This is the first time we’ve found a cosmetics firm that would
admit to using fetal material,” she said.

Neocutis is mounting a publicity
campaign to counter Children of God for Life, defending the use of fetal tissue
for product development on moral grounds.

“We feel that we are in complete
compliance with the laws of God and the laws of man,” stated Mark Lemko, the
president of Neocutis’ American subsidiary, in response to an e-mail from one
member of the public. The firm has prepared a general statement on the issue
and a page of questions and answers, in which it argues:

•
It wasn’t “involved with the acquisition of the initial fetal tissue” but knows
abortion was done morally and legally. The fetus in question “could not survive
to term” and its termination “was deemed medically necessary by attending physicians.”

•
Medical research using fetal tissue has saved many lives; indeed, it was used
to develop the vaccine for polio in 1952.

•
Neocutis’ products do not “directly use the original tissue,” but “this single
donation can enable production of some 900 million biological bandages for
patients suffering severe wounds, burns and other serious skin conditions.”

•
The cells from fetuses have “unique properties” that aid in healing without
scarring, while animal cells may be rejected by the host.

In rebuttal, Vinnedge notes that
Neocutis’ website calls the company a “spin-off” of the University of Lausanne.
It is, therefore, complicit in the abortion. Furthermore, Lemko told the
Register the firm was started by University of Lausanne medical school
scientists in 2002 to develop “new medicines using cell tissue technology.”

More Abortions Needed

What’s more, says Vinnedge, cell
lines run out of steam, and after a few decades, more abortions will be needed
to maintain production.

Also, she notes that Dignitas
Personae, the 2008 encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI, says that the
medical use of fetal tissue is moral only if the abortion was spontaneous and
unintentional — a miscarriage, in other words — and only with the consent of
the parents.

There is more wrong with Neocutis’
claims, says Theresa Deisher, president of AVM Biotech, a Seattle research firm
dedicated to producing morally acceptable treatments and vaccines.

Deisher, who has a Ph.D. in
molecular and cellular physiology, argues that Neocutis is misleading when it
limits the moral question to the “acquisition” of tissue from a single aborted
fetus.

“The tissue comes from just one fetus,
but to research the process properly, they would have had to do at least 10 and
probably more like 100,” said Deisher. “And since their research says they
found male tissue worked better than female, that’s probably 10 male and 10
female fetuses and, again, more like 100 of each.”

Deisher also addressed Lemko’s
claims about the “unique properties” of fetal tissue. The same benefits can be
obtained from tissue taken from the foreskins of babies. And there are
alternative lines of research on healing that don’t involve injecting fetal
tissue. As for the morality of using abortion byproducts, Ted Furton, an
ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, says
Catholic moral teaching forbids Catholics from conducting research using tissue
from fetuses and, as consumers, using products such as Neocutis’ skin-care
line.

Rarely Permitted

However, “Catholics are permitted
the use of products derived from intentionally aborted fetuses when there is no
alternative treatment,” Furton said. “But they must do so only under protest,”
he added, citing Directive 66 from the U.S. Catholic bishops’ “Ethical and
Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services.”

He
cited the case of Rubella, a disease for which the only vaccine available came
from fetal tissue.

As
for Neocutis’ line of skin-care products, it fails on all counts. Such products
are not medically necessary in themselves, and there are morally derived
alternatives.

What’s more, he agrees with Deisher
that Neocutis’ claim that their products come from a single fetus that was
going to die anyway doesn’t hold water.

Furton said many cells from many
fetuses would have had to be tried to find one that worked: “You don’t just
happen to get one cell to spontaneously reproduce magically.”

Steve
Weatherbe writes from Victoria, British Columbia.

Church Teaching on Vaccines

The
Church has taken up the issue of the use of cells derived from aborted babies
in various documents.

In its
2008 document Dignitas
Personae, the Vatican outlined
guidelines for scientific research and for the production of vaccines or other
products. It quoted Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which said the use of human embryos or fetuses as an object of
experimentation “constitutes a crime against their dignity as human beings who
have a right to the same respect owed to a child once born, just as to every
person.”

When
researchers use “biological material of illicit origin which has been produced
apart from their research center or which has been obtained commercially, there
must be no complicity in deliberate abortion,” said the Vatican instruction Donum Vitae.

Dignitas
Personae says that when there is
danger to the health of children parents may use a vaccine that was developed
using cell lines of illicit origin, but “everyone has the duty to make known
their disagreement and to ask that their health-care system make other types of
vaccines available.”

— USCCB.org

Most Flu Vaccines Avoid Moral Problem

As America girds
itself to repel a pandemic of the potentially fatal H1N1 flu, Catholic
activists are laboring to set up a systematic way of certifying and promoting
morally acceptable vaccines and medical treatments.

None of the
vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration uses aborted fetal
cell lines, reports one of the those activists, Debi Vinnedge, the executive
director of Children of God for Life, a Tennessee-based group that monitors the
biotechnology sector for any examples of immoral research, especially the use
of fetal tissue or cell lines derived from it.

“We are
pleased,” said Vinnedge. “Americans have enough public-health concerns without
compounding the problem with moral issues.”

Nonetheless, she
warns, at least one vaccine maker, Sanofi Pasteur, has H1N1 vaccine in
development that uses a fetal cell line, PER C6.

Vinnedge uses
her COGforLife.org website to promote vaccines and other biotech products that
conform to Catholic moral teachings.

Her website
contains a constantly updated list of vaccines that pass and fail the moral
test.

Across the
continent at Seattle’s AVM Biotech, Catholic researcher Theresa Deisher has
expanded beyond her initial purpose of making vaccines and treatments that meet
Catholic moral criteria and has established the Sound Choice Pharmaceutical
Institute to promote any producer of products that meet that standard.

“There will be
two levels of certification,” said Deisher. “The lower level means the product
on the shelf was not manufactured using aborted fetal tissue. The higher level
means there was also no use of aborted fetal tissue at the research stage.”

Deisher expects
drug manufacturers who apply for certification to let her see their research
and to pay a fee for the certification.

Fetal cell lines
regenerate quickly but can contain contaminant DNA from the original fetus that
could provoke an immune reaction in the recipient of a vaccine.

The use of
aborted fetal tissue or its cell line derivatives is widespread. “There is some
absolute quackery being practiced on desperate people seeking cures,” she said.
“They are being injected with fetal tissue when there is no valid evidence it
will work.”

Comments

Join the Discussion

We encourage a lively and honest discussion of our content. We ask that charity guide your words.
By submitting this form, you are agreeing to our discussion guidelines.
Comments are published at our discretion. We won’t publish comments that lack charity, are off topic, or are more than 400 words.
Thank you for keeping this forum thoughtful and respectful.